How could an American president be so anti-American?

After an initial grace period in which most Americans were willing to give a new president the benefit of the doubt, what this nation has steadily watched is a man and an administration almost exclusively governing against the will of the people. While the crux of his predecessors low approval ratings were in fighting an ‘unpopular war’, President Obama is watching his own approval rating plunge due to an unpopular, well, everything else. His record has been so blatantly in contrast to the will of this nation, that it could very nearly be defined as anti-American.

The latest example of this can be seen in the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to fight the Arizona immigration law through the courts; a law that 59% of U.S. voters would like to see in their very own state. Similar findings demonstrate that prior to this week’s ruling, 56% opposed the decision to challenge the legality of the law in the first place.

This certainly hasn’t been the only example of the Obama administration fighting hard to usurp the voice of the people. It is almost as if White House briefings indicate the mood of the country, and the president subsequently instructs his staff to move in the opposite direction.

Observe…

The most obvious example of this has been the force-feeding of the health care reform bill down the collective throats of a nation. With the vote looming in mid-March, the measure was opposed by likely voters by a wide margin, 54-41%. Worse, the respondents who felt the strongest toward the bill were overwhelmingly in opposition. 45% strongly opposed, compared to 26% who strongly favored the plan.

It is the first victory touted by the Obama administration, it is the topic of his current ‘summer of recovery’ tour, and it was (and remains) a big mistake according to Americans. Just two weeks prior to signing his $787 billion stimulus bill into law, two separate polls showed citizens beginning to question the wasteful government spending plan. It was opposed 43-37%, but that didn’t stop the president and his cohorts from pursuing their economic agenda at the people’s expense. Fortunately for the unemployed, as Obama promised, the unemployment rate stayed below 8% and, er … well, never mind.

In response to the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama issued a ban on deepwater oil drilling, a policy that nearly three quarters of Americans oppose. Because the opposition to this is so massive, the administration apparently views it as a policy more-so in need of passage, issuing two moratoriums on deepwater drilling – a move that fellow Democrat Mary Landrieu claimed could “cost more jobs than the spill itself.” Perhaps the ‘summer of recovery’ doesn’t apply to the gulf coast.

Another result of the oil disaster has been the administration’s expressed desire to move forward on the so-called cap-and-trade legislation. The legislation, an attempt to limit the total carbon dioxide emissions allowed to be released into the environment, while also imposing a massive tax burden on the economy, is opposed by 70% of Americans.